Enhancing Success for All Students

What do you expect your students to be able to do to benefit from your teaching?

What if they can’t?

Anne Simpson

Head of the Disability Service, University of Strathclyde

anne.simpson@strath.ac.uk

Enhancing Success for All Students

Talk: an introduction to the disabling environment

http://www.celebratingthejourney.org/talk-videos.asp

What are the benefits?

In designing a course, or teaching for that course, or in designing an assessment, what did you set out to give students, to take from the experience as a benefit?

What are your expectations?

If students are to derive that benefit, what did you expect them to be able to DO?

Barriers

And what can you do if students can’t do that, or in that way?

Solutions

Could you have designed the course, or the teaching, the placement or the assessment in such a way that the likelihood of all students being able to derive the benefit would have been greater?

Enhancing Success for All Students

A higher education environment that is as accessible as it can be is less likely to be disabling.What makes it ‘accessible’? What’s ‘the environment of higher education’?

Teachability

• Lectures• Seminars• Placement, study abroad, field trips• Examinations and Assessments• Course descriptions• E teaching• Practical classes• Courses and programmes of study

Adjustments v courses and teaching designed to be accessible?

Legal considerations:• Anticipatory duty to make adjustments

• Public Sector Duty to Promote Disability Equality: Impact assessments

• Participation of disabled people in public life

Example: Exams and Assessments

What are the benefits of exams and assessments for all students?

What do you expect students to be able to DO to derive these benefits?

What barriers can you foresee?

What are the possible solutions?

‘Accessible’

‘Accessible’ ≠ ‘easy’ or ‘easier’

It means ‘without avoidable or unnecessary barriers’.

A Competence standard is

‘an academic, medical or other standard applied by or on behalf of an education provider for the purpose of determining whether a person has a particular level of competence or ability’. (5.71)

Competence standards – why are they important to the DDA?

There is no duty to make reasonable adjustments to a provision, criterion or practice which the Act defines as a ‘competence standard’. (5.70)

If a disabled student is disadvantaged substantially as a result, this will be disability related discrimination, but it may be justifiable.

Competence standards…

‘… any such requirement or condition only amounts to a competence standard if its purpose is to demonstrate a particular level of a relevant competence or ability.’

If it is not relevant, then it is not a competence standard as described in the Code of Practice.

Disability-related discrimination might be justifiable

May be justifiable if you can show:

• The standard is or would be applied equally to people who do not have his (sic) particular disability; and

• Its application is a proportionate way of achieving a legitimate aim.

Is the application of the standard a proportionate means of achieving a

legitimate aim?

• Is there a pressing need that supports the aim the treatment is designed to achieve?

• Does applying the standard achieve that aim?

• Is there no other way of achieving that aim, less detrimental to the rights of disabled people?

3-hour essay style exam, Arts and Social Science

Is it likely that some of these aspects of achievement might be at odds with students’ impairments?

If so, then what?

Adjustments?

• Extra time?

• Rest breaks?

• Amanuenses?

• OU yardstick examination?

• Signed answers for students whose first language is BSL?

• Continuous assessment instead of exam?

Literature, Languages and Culture

“One of the assessments is an oral exam in spoken German and a listening comprehension. The oral exam tests fluency and presentation skills in the spoken language, and the student’s accent, intonation, pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.”

Expectations → Barriers

What if the successful acquisition of some of these skills is adversely affected by the nature of some students’ impairments?

What then?

Solutions and Limits

How the assessment regime fits into the course, and how the course fits into the programme;

Competence standards – genuine and relevant, proportionate way of achieving a legitimate aim, least detrimental to disabled people.

Adjustments

What you can change rests on what you should assess:

• Speed?

• Memory?

• Presentation?

• Performance under pressure?

So what does this mean?

Is it wrong to assess, e.g. manual dexterity, speech, presentation, stamina…?

Summary

The benefits

The expectations

The foreseeable barriers

The solutions

Adjustment → Routine, anticipation, universal design.

Conclusions

Wider application of the approach.

Questions?

Comments?

Further discussion?